I’m reporting from Ubuntu, where most things have been great and others have been a little bumpy…
Music
Fucking hell, I got Reaper working with the Scarlett! Not sure why, but I think it’s because I install installed it using sudo which put the app into /opt/REAPER. After I became tired of fighting with it, I uninstalled Reaper with the idea of recording just in MixBus but quickly found my next bit of frustration was using synths and instruments in MixBus whose piano roll editor is less than stellar. On a whim, I decided to reinstall Reaper and see if I could get it working.
This time, I decided to install it without using sudo and put it in /home/my_un/opt/REAPER/ and holy shitballs, it picked the Scarlett up on first launch and it just works.
Now I need to see what exists as far as decent drum plugins for Linux. Off to Linux Music Rocks! I mean, AVL is fantastic, but I’m not sold on all the sounds yet and there is no way you can fine tune the individual drums.
Writing
Scrivner is doing its thing even though I dislike the non-native aspect. It also handles fonts weirdly. Some parts of the interface are just difficult to read and the editor does this weird thing where if I use italics some letters become illegible or, like, a capital P looks like a capital F, etc. Whatever, this is a minor gripe considering it works just fine past that.
Gaming
I know, I know, games are not that important in the large scheme of things, but I built this here computer for two reasons:
- Multimedia
- Gaming
While Proton is an absolutely great idea, I am finding playing games challenging. Granted, I’m only playing The Witcher 3 at the moment, but it takes forever to load (mostly around two minutes or so, but there have been times that just getting the CDPR launch window took around five minutes after Steam loaded a bunch of Vulcan stuff), crashes randomly, some of my settings are never saved, and the cut scenes are playing only on the far right side of my monitor cutting off a chunk of the scene.
I’m trying to take all of the gaming issues in stride. I know the issue is Proton is a compatibility layer that was created to allow Valve to build and sell Steam Decks. I know that they offer Proton to Linux users but pretty much wash their hands of it. Who can blame them? There is a literal metric fuck tonne of distros out there and Valve can’t honestly be held responsible for ensuring the games they offer in Steam are 100% flawless on every single one.
At this point, I’ll probably be keeping a Windows partition around just for when I feel like fighting Drowners and Wyverns.
Other Items
Not Linux related, but my Razer Deathadder V2 Pro is slowly dying. I mean, I did buy it second hand, and the wireless dongle died a couple of months after I picked it up, but the Bluetooth has been aces. Now when the battery gets low and I plug it in, the mouse just stops working. Whatever. Not sure I’ll be picking up a wireless mouse next time around. For now I have an old Deathadder Chroma that is doing just fine, thank you very much.
Flipping back and forth between Linux and Windows is hell on Bluetooth in general. Pretty sure this is because I’m doing it on the same hardware. It’s not a huge deal, I just have to remove and then re-pair my shit when I boot into a different OS.